Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge: Indicators of Early Literacy in Croatian

Sa？etak In this paper, the relationship between phonological awareness and letter knowledge and their inherent structures in the period of early literacy are examined. In this crosssectional study involving 746 children, factor analysis was performed one year before children began formal education, in order to define the latent variables that underlie manifest variables of phonological awareness and letter knowledge in Croatian, a language with transparent orthography. The results suggest that rhyme is equally distributed across both syllabic and phonemic awareness. The results also confirm a correlation between letter knowledge and phonological awareness, and phonemic awareness in particular. The analysis identified two factors related to letter knowledge, in which upper- and lowercase letters demonstrated partially different distributions between the two factors. These findings have implications for educational policy in the area of early literacy, especially in the development of preschool curricula and language intervention program